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Category Archives: General

‘Open’ Does Not Equal ‘Free’

With traditional print media, i.e. newspapers and magazines, being distressed by the ever-increasing challenge of generating revenue online, “pay walls” have become a hotly discussed panacea for both halting the demise of offline formats, and for making their virtual outlets profitable (or, at least, sustainable). In any case, a lot has been contributed to the […]

85 Vauxhall Cross vs. 221b Baker Street – Is Holmes actually better than Bond?

At least this is what Lieutenant General (ret.) Samuel L. Wilson, former director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), suggests in his citation found partly also in our blog’s subtitle: “Ninety percent of intelligence comes from open sources. The other ten percent, the clandestine work, is just the more dramatic. The real intelligence hero is […]

Tracking Crises

Rather distinct from, yet related to how crises evolve, is how to spot and track them, a challenge CrisisTracker, “a new tool for collaborative social media analysis in disaster response” based on open source information, is tackling. More specifically, CrisisTracker aims at creating an “overview of what is being said in social media (including rumors and […]

From Russia with Love – About the Vulnerability of Open Societies

For the first time after the end of the Cold War, Germany has publicly uncovered Russian spies, going by the codenames of Pit and Tina and receiving circa 100,000 EUR a year by their secret employer, and has been trying to exchange them for two allied agents imprisoned in Russia without success. The seizure took […]